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Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Supposing I love you. And you also love me, 2011, architectural intervention with bench and projection and montage of still images with dialogue, sound, English subtitles, 13min, stills. Courtesy the artist and Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam

In today’s franchise-driven cinema, the production of ‘trilogies’ is de rigueur. Three being the magic number, the trilogy — a secularised triptych — gives a semblance of artistic planning and closure to a series (but of course there can always be a follow-up trilogy). To the extent that Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s three slide works Après la reprise, la prise (2009), Pertinho de Alphaville (So Close to Alphaville, 2010) and Supposing I love you. And you also love me (2011) follow the logic of the franchise trilogy, they do so in an almost parodic manner — as when some of the protagonists of Après la reprise return, as if by ‘popular demand’, in Supposing I love you. In fact, Supposing I love you is something of an entr’acte, for the official third part of van Oldenborgh’s trilogy will be the work Bete & Deise (2012—). Even in this case, then, the trilogy format spawns spin-offs, but the interrelations between the parts are far from clear-cut. Strategies and motifs recur, but in a manner that recalls musical variations more than the relentless branding of franchises.

All three works consist of a cinematic series of slides that dissolve into each other (‘real’ slides in the first two pieces, digital stills in the last) in dialogue with a soundtrack on which we hear what we presume are the voices of those we see in the images, but not in sync.1 In Après la

Footnotes

When Supposing I love you was selected for inclusion in the Danish Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Pavilion’s organisers deemed the risk of slide projectors getting jammed or breaking down over the duration of the exhibition too great; hence the digital option was pursued.
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Tariq Ramadan’s tenure as guest professor at Erasmus University and as advisor to the city of Rotterdam ended in 2009 over a controversy concerning his work for the Iranian network PressTV. Ramadan, essentially a conservative interested in integrating Islam in Europe, is habitually accused of being a fundamentalist ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ by right-wing populists. At the moment of writing, the Dutch Wikipedia entry on Ramadan still hawks the myth that he staged a campaign to prevent Voltaire’s play ‘Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet' (1736) in Geneva in 1993 (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_Ramadan#cite_ref-7); for Ramadan’s rebuttal, see ‘Se prendre pour Voltaire?’, http://www.tariqramadan.com/Se-prendre-pour-Voltaire.html (both last accessed on 24 October 2011).
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Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), in Kritische Studienausgabe 1 (ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari), Munich: DTV, 1988, pp.92—95. English translation available at http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm (last accessed on 24 October 2011). According to Nietzsche, the ‘Socratic’ tendency in Euripides’s tragedies leads to the atrophying of the chorus, from which the tragedy had emerged in the first place. One might note that in Supposing I love you, the youngsters form a quasi-chorus, interrogated Socratically by Ramadan.
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Matthew Wilson Smith, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York and London: Routledge, 2007, pp.9—10.
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See Roland Barthes ‘Le Troisième sens’ (1970), an important text for van Oldenborgh. See also R. Barthes, ‘The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills’, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (trans. Richard Howard), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp.41—62.
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